A Survey on Multicast Routing Protocols for IoT Applications

Multicast is an essential component in many IoT applications. This paper presents the simulation and performance analysis of four different multicast routing protocols for Internet of Things (IoT). They are AMR6 (Advanced Multicast Routing for 6LoWPAN), M-CoAP (Multicast Constrained Application Protocol), Simple Agile RPL multiCAST (SARCAST), Enhanced Stateless Multicast RPL Forwarding (ESMRF) and for IoT. The performance of these protocols is compared in this work using standard metrics including throughput, reliability, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay under two different scenarios: 1) changing the number of nodes, and 2) changing the traffic load. The major goal of this work is to choose one of four multicast routing protocols that is suitable and effective for IoT applications based on the relative strengths of each protocol. AMR6 achieves improved throughput, reliability, and packet delivery ratio with less end-to-end delay, according to experimental results.